He has spent the last 11 years meticulously crafting a diverse portfolio of drawings ranging in subject matter from the realistic to the abstract – or sometimes both. Joshua spends hundreds of hours on each individual piece, building up layer upon layer of intense detail, intertwining patterning and naturalism into his work. A fine selection of many of his past – and current – endeavors will be on display at 7sq Gallery/Works On Paper in Bellows Falls, VT during the months of April through June 10. An opening reception for the artist will be held on Friday, April 20 from 6-8pm as part of this month’s Bellows Falls Third Friday (BF3F). More information about Joshua’s art can be found on his website www.joshuadallaire.com. Refreshments served. 6-8pm.

The Connecticut River Watershed has been the primary locus of his barn photography, in the broad alluvial plane of rich farming land in Connecticut and Massachusetts and among the scenic hills and valleys of Vermont and New Hampshire.

Photography and barns were a part of Lowell Fewster’s upbringing in Upstate New York. Growing up in a Kodak family he was taking pictures at the age of six with a hand-me-down Kodak box camera. About this age he was also exploring the family farm, hiding and creating forts in the hayloft in the large post and beam gambrel-roofed barn his father built in 1942. Some of his earliest photographs were of the barns and Angus cattle. At a Maine Photographic Workshop five years ago he created a photo essay on “disappearing barns,” and began to focus his efforts on the classic barns that have sheltered livestock and hay on family farms.

The exhibit consists of more than thirty images. This is his sixth solo exhibition. Fewster’s work will be on display at the Newberry Gallery from April 7 until May 29, 2012. An open house will be on Friday, April 20 from 5-8pm. The Gallery is located in the Vermont Pretzel & Cookie Company at 24 Rockingham Street, Bellows Falls, VT, and is open Monday to Friday from 7am to 5pm and Saturday from 8am to 3pm.

Her first novel, Pirate Jenny, was published in 1990; her most recent collection of poems is Romanticism (W.W. Norton, June 2009). Previous poetry collections are Blackbird Bye Bye, Psalms, and Swan Electric. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The Nation, and Slate. She has taught widely and was for many years a magazine and book editor in New York City. Her honors include a Guggenheim award, the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, a Whitney Humanities Fellowship at Yale University, a Sidney Harman Fellowship, and the Stover Prize. As Director of Creative Writing, she is a member of the English Department faculty at Skidmore College, and is also on the faculty of the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.

About Miss Fuller: It is 1850. Margaret Fuller–feminist, journalist, orator, and “the most famous woman in America”–is returning from Europe where she covered the Italian revolution for The New York Tribune. She is bringing home with her an Italian husband, the Count Ossoli, and their two-year-old son. But this is not the gala return of a beloved American heroine. This is a furtive, impoverished return under a cloud of suspicion and controversy.
When the ship founders in a hurricane off Long Island and Fuller and her small family drown, her friends back home, Emerson and others of the Transcendentalist Concord circle, send Henry David Thoreau to the wreck in hopes of recovering her last book manuscript. He comes back declaring himself empty-handed–but actually he has found a private and revealing document, a confession in letters, of a strong and beloved woman’s life like no other in the 19th century. Her account of the life of the mind and body, of experiences in Rome under siege, of dangerous childbirth and great physical and moral courage–are eventually revealed to her one reader, Thoreau’s youngest sister, Anne.
She was the most famous woman in America. And nobody knew who she was. The book is a trade paperback original at $14.99.

Please call 802-463-9404 for book and event reservations. Depending upon attendance, the event might be held in the Hotel Windham, which will give the public an opportunity to explore the new conference facility. So be sure to get your reservations in to meet the author and see the new facility.

I’ve been slightly obsessed with the latest phone technology, and as a former photojournalist, I am fascinated with the immediate capturing and gratification this tool has to offer.

It started as a walk with my Labrador Retrievers in the wintry fields of Westminster, Vermont where I came across cool patterns and designs in the puddles of frozen water between tractor tire tracks and fallow cornfields.

Once captured with my mobile device, I was mesmerized by the trapped bubbles, the perfect circular patterns and the linear designs.
Although the perfect tones and scale are limited with this medium, the essence of found art leads to purity of form and, like childhood exuberance, I found my joy again in the process.